Potential Upgrade Path

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teej9

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Mar 28, 2013
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Howdy Folks-

I have a 4 ish year old machine, that has been upgraded throughout its life. Currently running an FX-6300, R9 380 and 16GB of RAM on an MSI 970 board. As I look to keep the system optimized, I am thinking I need to upgrade the CPU. I am wondering what the best options would be going forward, using what components I already have. I figure there is little to be gained from going after another FX processor, and with Skylake needing DDR4, that upgrade becomes a bit pricey. I was hoping for some potential paths of least resistance towards upgrading the CPU. Do I go for an older gen intel, or wait for Zen, or say to hell with the budget and get a 6600K? Any thoughts?
 
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Barty1884
If it's doing what you need it to at the moment, there's no harm in waiting for Zen.

Best case - Zen provides healthy competition to Intel, and Intel revisit their pricing. That gives you something worthwhile to think about.

Worst case - Zen fails miserably. You can still spend the budget on a 6600K at that time, or Kaby Lake CPU's should be available by then, getting you onto the latest revision. Longer term (Q2 2017 last I heard, Cannonlake should be available too).

I don't see older Intel generations being particularly viable. Skylake and Haswell are priced very similarly - the only benefit would be being able to reuse your DDR3. If you must upgrade right now, I'd go to Skylake + DDR4. You're going to need DDR4...
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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If it's doing what you need it to at the moment, there's no harm in waiting for Zen.

Best case - Zen provides healthy competition to Intel, and Intel revisit their pricing. That gives you something worthwhile to think about.

Worst case - Zen fails miserably. You can still spend the budget on a 6600K at that time, or Kaby Lake CPU's should be available by then, getting you onto the latest revision. Longer term (Q2 2017 last I heard, Cannonlake should be available too).

I don't see older Intel generations being particularly viable. Skylake and Haswell are priced very similarly - the only benefit would be being able to reuse your DDR3. If you must upgrade right now, I'd go to Skylake + DDR4. You're going to need DDR4 eventually regardless, so you may aswell go for it on your next upgrade.

Only you can answer whether the FX6300 will see you through a few more months (less than 6, for sure) but, if it can, I'd definitely recommend you wait it out.
 
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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Apr 16, 2015
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I don't know how I feel about Zen. I'm a little optimistic, but I'm certainly not holding my breath.

We need the competition, to give a worthwhile alternative - which will force Intel to up their game & provide substantial improvements (rather than the usual ~5-10% per generation), or reduce prices.
 
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teej9

Honorable
Mar 28, 2013
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10,510
Thanks folks, the machine does what I need it to at the moment, I just want to increase the performance of the machine. It is used as both a work (fairly light, many browser based programs running, office that kind of thing) and gaming rig. The only real things it struggles with at the moment are CPU bound games, so it may be worth waiting just to see if Zen is viable.
 
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Barty1884

Barty1884

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While I'm not surprised a 6300 is struggling some in CPU bound titles, unless you're trying to game at 4K or are a perfectionist looking to max out every single title right now, it should hold on a little longer - you may have to reduce settings etc.

While the FX-6300 to i5-6600K is an amazing upgrade, you're so close to Zen's release (or at least benchmarking, which will give you a true idea of performance) that, unless you were really struggling to make anything at least 'playable' for now - it should be worth the wait. Again, best case = worthwhile competition and pricing changes. Worth case, you can still go Skylake, or Kaby lake.
 
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